January 15, 2024 - 5:40pm
Imagine sitting down for BBC News at Ten only to witness a group of masked men wielding guns and grenades take over the programme. This was the situation many Ecuadorians found themselves in last week, as gunmen stormed TC Televisión and broadcast their hostage-taking live.
This coordinated attack was part of a campaign of violence which has brought Ecuador to the centre of international attention. The day of terror saw car bombings, arson attacks, shootings, and prison riots across the country as Ecuadorian gangs caused chaos. At least 15 people were killed in the violence. Since then, around 900 people have been arrested, with videos surfacing of the brutal treatment of alleged gang members. The streets of major cities have been empty as civilians fearfully stay inside while the military and police patrol for gangs.
The response from newly-elected President Daniel Noboa has been to designate 22 gangs as terrorist organisations and declare war, stating that Ecuador is in an “internal armed conflict”. The country is now in a two-month state of emergency, with nightly curfews and the military patrolling the streets.
The open warfare Noboa promises is similar to the declaration of El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele, who was elected in 2019 and has taken on the gangs plaguing his country. Bukele, albeit with widespread accusations of human rights violations, won the war. With El Salvador’s mega-prisons filled, the gangs’ presence in the streets has fallen dramatically — and with it the violence and illicit drug and extortion trades they create. Gangs have been broken up, and the homicide rate has fallen from a height of 106 per 100,000 people in 2015 to just 2.4 last year, a rate significantly lower than the US. Noboa will likely try to emulate the success that has brought Bukele a national approval rating of around 90%.
Yet Ecuador’s current situation differs drastically from that of El Salvador, meaning a hardline militaristic approach may not bring the long-term success Noboa seeks. The country’s criminal networks are far more complex than El Salvador’s because of its status as an epicentre of the profitable cocaine trade. Ecuador previously had one of the lowest homicide rates in Latin America but, having become a transit hub for cocaine, this has increased ninefold since 2017.
Ecuador’s gangs exist within a network of international cartels and ex-Colombian guerrillas, and are therefore better armed and more powerful than gangs in El Salvador such as MS-13. This power was demonstrated last week, and will make the conflict tough for an already systemically corrupt military and police force.
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SubscribeEcuador’s militarised approach may offer the appearance of peace in the short term, but the endemic violence won’t end until the root causes are addressed.
Wherever the situation becomes absolutely unbearable and governments begin to take drastic measures, human rights groups appear and frightened experts begin to write: “It’s all for nothing, and we don’t know if it will work?”
When a society has to a large extent broken down, is it possible to restore civil life without resorting to measures that violate human rights? Or does the observance of human rights prevent the restoration of civil order once things have gone beyond a certain point? We may find out.
Without security, it is impossible to enjoy any other rights.
Human rights has been bloating to into a kakistocracy run by “no skin in the games” anuwheres.
Nayib Bukele shown a succesfull example of how gangs can be crushed, how it benefits most of society and how it comes at the exepense of gangstas. so yes, gangstas will suffer from a gang crackdown, and judicial conviction standards have to be adjusted to what allows the efficient elimination of gangs.
F*** criminals, the right of honest citizens ar emore important thean theirs. Crush gangs, including their legal arm which consist in a lot of NGOs and other self-processed “human rights defenders”.
And Bukele wants to establish Chinese supplied and inspired surveilance systems to maintain his power. And he wants the power to sentence 900 to life imprisonment people at a time. Unless you’d be happy to live in this sort of society yourself you’re a hypocrite suggesting it for those in other countries. El Salvador and Ecuador aren’t exactly analogous, but the majority of the money that actually buys the guns and funds the networks of these gangs comes from drug consumption in our own countries. The problem starts with us. So there’s every argument we should implement the same policies over here to stop it. There are something over 1 million cocaine users in the UK. You almost certainly know someone that uses it, probably someone from your own family. Would you be happy for them to be tried with another 899 people to face life imprisonment for something that was so destructive you didn’t even realise they were doing it? Would you be happy for these sorts of policies to be implemented knowing at some point the government with these powers might be one you don’t actually like? The answer is to legalise the whole thing and take the money out of the hands of the gangs and let people do what they want with their own lives.
Journalists and Human Rights Lawyers – those who turn up after the battle is finished, and knife the victors.
The break down of Law and Order does away with a great many human rights.
Thinking of our own country…was Britain devoid of human rights before Blair introduced the 1998 Human Rights Act and signed us up to the ECHR? Somehow I think we were doing pretty well – although obviously imperfectly – and violent criminals and sex offenders thought a little more carefully about ‘the crime being worth the time’.For example, carrying knives hadn’t become almost routine for inner city school boys who live in fear of being knifed themselves.
Early in the 2000s it was clear that the laws had put the rights of criminals above those of victims rather than helping the common man or woman to have their cases heard in the UK rather than taking them to the EU court.
It is hard to understand why we are still signed up.
It’s odd the author talks about how well tooled Ecuadorian gangs are and then expects tackling social and economic conditions as the way to combat them. The El Salvador model is the only one worth following at the moment given the success they have had.
Legalize. Regulate. Everywhere.
Precisely. Never is the problem laid at the hypocritical door of the countries that provide both the very middle class, probably highly environmentally conscious, and otherwise generally socially pious citizens that consume and pay for the drugs, and the pressure to maintain international drug prohibition laws that provide the funds and incentive to the gangs to carry out their dirty, socially destructive, murderous work. Instead as in the comments here we just suggest their governments install military marshal law over pretty much an entire continent, without any consideration whether this has any chance of actually working where there are societies with large levels of complete economic deprivation being tacitly asked by others with relatively extravagant wealth to do whatever they need to with however much money they need to keep providing the drugs, they will keep doing it one way or another. How about we have marshal law here and armed police visit every house to search for drugs and we build some mega prisons for all the people that actually fund this business, and have a far greater number of options to choose in their lives? How many of the sons and daughters of the prohibitionists would be put away to rot in the stench of cells of a hundred people with two open latrines to share? Would they visit their darlings and tell them it was for their own good because these drugs that were so physically and morally destructive they didn’t even have any idea they might be taking them, were so bad that this is a better result for them? And they maintain their moral high ground, it makes me sick.